Motherhood and job, not an easy balance

Iam talking to B, a young mother just emerging from the shock and awfulness of Covid-19, working from home, lockdown, online classes, housework, and illness. For some reason, we start talking about regret. I tell her that what I regret most is not having more fun with my daughters when they were growing up. And I’m glad Covid-19 changed the way we work.

Nearly two decades ago, fun wasn’t a word that often figured in my vocabulary. It’s not that I was a dour mother. I read to my children. We pressed flowers inside fat books. I even humiliated myself (and no doubt them) by briefly joining their tennis class to get more time together.

But, in the end, there were only so many hours to fit a full-time job, family and home. When I discovered I had diabetes, the task of excavating the time to go to a gym or even a simple walk seemed impossibly daunting.

I quit.

Who gets to be the fun parent is often a function of how much a partner chips in with housework, including child-rearing. And the conversation, particularly in a postCovid-19 world, has been on getting men to do more at home to keep more women in the workforce.

What if the focus was on equity rather than just the workforce? For many women, particularly young mothers, leisure is a radical idea. It’s not just hostile public spaces — try finding a woman taking a nap in a park in New Delhi — but a question of finding the time in a country where women spend eight times as much time as men on domestic chores.

Add to this the weight of social judgment. When Divya Iyer, the district collector of Pathanamthitta district in Kerala, turned up at the valedictory session of a film festival on October 30, a Sunday, after informing her hosts that she would be bringing her three-year-old son along, she was accused of impropriety.

Women have mostly learned to ignore the background chatter on our choices. When I worked part-time on a part-time salary, I heard a lot of, “So nice of you to drop in”. These comments invariably come from men. In October last year, Karnataka health minister Sudhakar K made sweeping comments on “modern Indian women [who] want to stay single, are unwilling to give birth even after marriage and desire children by surrogacy”.

For too long, too many of us have remained silent about just what it takes to be an employed mother, believing the lie that if we lean in enough, it will all magically work out.

It won’t. If we want workplaces and society to acknowledge, if not understand, what it takes to be employed, we need to articulate our priorities, instead of hopelessly trying to catch all the balls in the air.

Iyer clarified: She’s a full-time mother and a full-time district collector. And with that, she shut her critics up. We need to hear more voices like hers.